Home Office Information Management Assessment

The Home Office underwent an Information Management Assessment (IMA) by The National Archives (TNA) in mid 2015. I welcome this assessment, which has now been published.

I am pleased that it recognises a number of examples of good practice; and that the Department has been assessed as good or satisfactory in most areas. In particular, it highlights as good practice our management of information risk, and the steps we have taken to improve our digital records management through the iManage system.

I recognise, however, that there are areas where we can improve our management of information in the Home Office, and accept that we need to do more to address these shortfalls. We can do more to join up knowledge and information management governance; I see our new Knowledge and Information Management Executive Group as the key forum for this. We also need to do more to strengthen our policy and processes around information assets, and to build on the good progress we have made with our iManage records management system to extend control over all our digital information repositories.

We are committed to addressing these issues through our future IT and information management improvement plans, and have already started to develop an action plan with The National Archives to achieve the improvements required.

MARK SEDWILL